Chapter 13

Clang.

Rin barely got her sword up in time to stop Altan’s trident from slicing her face in half. She did her best to ground herself, to dispel the ki of the blow evenly across her body and into the dirt, but even so, her legs trembled from the impact.

She and Altan had been at this for hours, it seemed. Her arms ached; her lungs seized for air.

But Altan wasn’t done. He shifted the trident, caught the blade of her sword between two prongs, and twisted hard. The pressure wrenched the sword out of Rin’s hands and sent it clattering against the ground. Altan pressed the tip of his trident to her throat. She raised her arms hastily in surrender.

“You’re reacting based on fear,” Altan said. “You’re not controlling this fight. You need to clear your mind and concentrate. Concentrate on me. Not my weapon.”

“It’s a bit hard when you’re trying to jab my eyes out,” she muttered, pushing his trident away from her face.

Altan lowered his weapon. “You’re still hedging. You’re resisting. You’ve got to let the Phoenix in. When you’ve called the god, when the god is walking in you, that’s a state of ecstasy. It’s a ki amplifier. You don’t get tired. You’re capable of extraordinary exertion. You don’t feel pain. You have to sink into that state.”

Rin could recall vividly the state of mind he wanted her to embrace. The burning feeling in her veins, the red lenses that shielded her vision. How other people became not people but targets. How she didn’t need rest, only pain, pain to fuel the fire.

The only times Rin had consciously been in this state were during the Trials, and then again at Sinegard. Both times she had been furious, desperate.

She hadn’t been able to rekindle the same state of mind since. She hadn’t been that angry since. She had only been confused, agitated, and, like right now, exhausted.

“Learn to tame it,” Altan said. “Learn to sink in and out of it. If you’re focused only on your enemy’s weapon, you’ll always be on the defensive. Look past the weapon to your target. Focus on what you want to kill.”

Altan was a much better teacher than Jiang. Jiang was frustratingly vague, absentminded, and deliberately obtuse. Jiang liked to dance around the answers, liked to make her circle around the truth like a starving vulture before he would give her a gratifying morsel of understanding.

But Altan wasted no time. He cut straight to the chase, gave her precisely the answers that she wanted. He understood her fears, and he knew what she was capable of.

Training with Altan was like training with an older brother. It was so bizarre for someone to tell her that they were the same—that his joints hyperextended like hers did, so she should turn out her foot in such a way. To have similarities with someone else, similarities that lay deep in their genes, was an overwhelmingly wonderful sensation.

With Altan she felt as if she belonged—not just to the same division or army, but to something deeper and older. She felt situated within an ancient web of lineage. She had a place. She was not a nameless war orphan; she was a Speerly.

At least, everyone seemed to think so. But despite everything, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss. She couldn’t call the god as easily as Altan could. Couldn’t move with the same grace as he could. Was that heritage, or training?

“Were you always like this?” she asked.

Altan appeared to tense. “Like what?”

“Like . . . you.” She gestured vaguely at him. “You’re—you’re not like the other students. Other soldiers. Could you always summon the fire? Could you always fight like you do?”

Altan’s expression was unreadable. “I trained at Sinegard for a long time.”

“But so did I!”

“You weren’t trained like a Speerly. But you’re a warrior, too. It’s in your blood. I’ll beat your heritage into you soon enough.” Altan gestured to her with his trident. “Weapons up.”

“Why a trident?” she asked when he finally let her take a break. “Why not a sword?” She hadn’t seen any other soldier who didn’t wield the standard Militia halberd and sword.

“Longer reach,” he said. “Opponents don’t come in close quarters when you’re fighting inside a silo of fire.”

She touched the prongs. The ends had been sharpened many times over; they were not shiny or smooth, but etched with the evidence of multiple battles. “Is that Speerly-made?”

It had to be. The trident was metal all the way through, not like Nikara weapons, which had wooden hilts. The trident was heavier, true, but Altan needed a weapon that wouldn’t burn through when he touched it.

“It came from the island,” he said. He poked her with the blunt end and gestured for her to pick up her sword. “Stop stalling. Come on, get up. Again.”

She threw her arms down in exhaustion. “Can’t we just get high?” she asked. She didn’t see how relentless physical training got her any closer to calling the Phoenix at all.

“No, we can’t just get high,” Altan said. He poked her again. “Lazy. That kind of thinking is a rookie mistake. Anyone can swallow some seeds and reach the Pantheon. That part’s easy. But forming a link with the god, channeling its power to your will and calling it back down—that takes discipline. Unless you’ve had practice honing your mind, it’s too easy for you to lose control. Think of it as a dam. The gods are sources of potential energy, like water flowing downhill. The drug is like the gate—it opens the way to let the gods through. But if your gate is too large, or flimsily constructed, then power rushes through unobstructed. The god ignores your will. Chaos ensues. Unless you want to burn down your own allies, you have to remember why you called the Phoenix. You’ve got to direct its power.”

“It’s like a prayer,” she said.

Altan nodded. “It’s exactly like a prayer. All prayer is simply repetition—a imposition of your demands upon the gods. The difference between shamans and everyone else is that our prayers actually work. Didn’t Jiang teach you this?”

Jiang had taught her the opposite of that. Jiang had asked her to clear her mind in meditation, to forget her own ego; to forget that she was a being separate from the universe. Jiang had taught her to erase her own will. Altan was asking her to impose her will on the gods.

“He only ever taught me to access the gods. Not to pull them back to our world.”

Altan looked amazed. “Then how did you call the Phoenix at Sinegard?”

“I wasn’t supposed to,” she said. “Jiang warned me not to. He said the gods weren’t meant to be weaponized. Only consulted. He was teaching me to calm myself, to find my connection to the larger cosmos and correct my imbalance, or . . . or whatever,” she finished lamely.

It was becoming apparent how little Jiang had really taught her. He hadn’t prepared her for this war at all. He had only tried to restrain her from wielding the power that she now knew she could access.

“That’s useless.” Altan looked disdainful. “Jiang was a scholar. I am a soldier. He was concerned with theology; I am concerned with how to destroy.” He opened his fist, turned it outward, and a small ring of fire danced over the lines of his palm. With his other hand he extended his trident. The flame raced from the ends of his fingers, danced across his shoulders, and licked all the way out to the trident’s three prongs.